The Art of Losing and Finding
by evizyt
Summary: Because mostly, when it is late, and he can't sleep, he lies awake and dreams of her: a waking, living dream. He wishes he were dead, not that he could die if he wanted to. He wishes that he had never heard of Dust or of other worlds, never met Lyra. And then he takes it all back, glad to have experienced such emotion even to lose it, glad to know that he had lived at all.


A/N: Because it's high time I began to publish this. I couldn't sleep for weeks after I finished The Amber Spyglass; I was too busy dreaming of this story. The title is based on the poem 'One Art' by Elizabeth Bishop. The opening line, which is repeated throughout, is "The art of losing isn't hard to master". This is technically the Prologue or 'Intro,' so it's short and sad. Things will get better, I promise.

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**The Art of Losing & Finding**

Prologue

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"Sometimes when it's late, and I can't sleep, I lie awake and think of things I could have done differently, or better, or more softly."

"How could you do things more softly?" She would ask, and giggle, and roll over, her laugh engulfing the pair.

He would lie back with her, intertwining their hands as he interwove their laughs, a tapestry of melody and harmony. Their hair would mingle on the bed—her burnished copper, his black hair longer and shaggy now, the way she would have liked it. She would have run her fingers through it when she kissed him, pulling him close, locking her fingers and never letting go.

Because mostly, when it is late, and he can't sleep, he lies awake and dreams of her: a waking, living dream. A dream so real that he can almost feel her beside him, hear the ghost of her laugh and the hollowness of her sobs. Her voice floats on air currents wherever he looks, and he is constantly turning around, expecting to see her face as she darts behind a pillar, trips through a door, peeps out from behind someone else.

Instead she is nowhere, and he is alone, haunted by a phantom. Her memory stalks him, made worse by the fact that he knows in the depths of his brain that she is alive, and he can't erase the conviction that these glimmers of Lyra are real, that as the worlds merge and separate his senses are so attuned to her that he can feel her proximity.

And so he is left, sleepless, restless, unable to eat for days, his head full of Lyra.

When he does sleep his hands clench the sheets like her hair and skin, sinking into the softness like a lover, and he is screaming with such agony that his mother and Mary run to his room, holding him down until he comes awake, sweating with a fear and a pain that he'd never known existed, until he'd lost her.

He can't go to school; it doesn't mean anything to him anymore. He roams the streets like a vagabond, looking for her, hollow-eyed.

His home life is stable now, and he could live like a normal boy his age, if he wanted.

He and his mother moved in with Mary Malone, helping her pay the rent for her small flat in Oxford. One of her colleagues, an Oliver Payne, had somehow known someone who'd helped them smooth things over with the law. And Will had gotten in contact with the manager of his father's trust again, and received access to that. There was quite a bit of money there—enough for Will to go to university, if he were so inclined, and to live comfortably with his mother and Mary.

But all Will can think about is Lyra.

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He thinks of her always, constantly. She is like a pressure on his mind, pushing up against the back of his eyes. She is painful, and he is painfully aware of her semi-presence, the ethereal haze that could just-almost-not-quite be her, be her lips, be the ghostly remnants of her smile and her laugh.

Her scent lives in his clothes, which he re-wears constantly. He begins to feel like a ghost as well, wandering in a daze, a haze of Lyra and sorrow.

He wishes he were dead, not that he could die if he wanted to. He wishes that he had never heard of Dust or of other worlds, never met Lyra. And then he takes it all back, glad to have experienced such emotion even to lose it, glad to know that he had lived at all.

Weeks fill with rage, and then others follow, full of pain and quiet sadness. Sometimes he will scream until his throat is sore, cursing the unfairness of it all. He shouts at Kirjava, telling her he loves Lyra more, wishing she would die in Lyra's world than live with him in this one, without her. She always knows he doesn't mean it, and he doesn't know which is worse, that he wants to mean it, or that he doesn't.

He doesn't speak to Mary and his mother for days. He yells at his mother, his poor, innocent mother.

He also dreams of Pan. He thinks of the wry, world-weary expression. He remembers the smile and the soft agreements. Most of all, he feels the soft, thick fur of a pine-marten underneath his hand, as he reflexively clenches and unclenches, the deep red of the marten mixing with the copper-blonde of Lyra's hair in his memory until the one becomes inseparable from the other.

He sleeps only to dream of her.

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Mary and his mother are worried; he can see it in the way they look at him.

He thinks he hears her voice at night, sees her slip behind the door. He runs outside, following that which he knows is not there, listening instead to his pain, only his pain, always his pain. It is the pain that fills him, consumes him, becomes him, as he searches for a meaning in his life that is no longer in this world. It is the pain that he remembers now.

Outside is misty and dark, almost raining, and he runs into the road, screaming her name.

"LYRA!" He shouts into the mist, repeating her name until his voice cracks with desperation. Neighbors' dogs are barking but he cannot stop anymore, cannot hold it in. He shrieks her name until his voice is past raw, he has been shouting for hours, for days, shouting for Lyra, shouting until he has no voice left at all.

It begins to rain, and he lies down on the pavement, still shouting, no longer her name but a wordless, voiceless, inhuman wail. He drags his nails down the tarmac, making them bleed and relishing in the pain. Anything to make himself feel more real, to draw him back to this world, to take away from the unceasing, unforgiving, ever-present pain in his mind and his chest.

He imagines that he will explode. Pain like this cannot be possible to survive, a lover impossible to outlive. He is not even sixteen but his blood is boiling, his head screaming with a migrainal headache to rival the clawing, ripping, burning, tearing sensation in his throat, his nose, his lungs.

"Lyra," he whispers; broken, beaten, prone. He is lying on the road in the rain, hands bleeding, hair dripping, and he can't take it any longer, can no longer handle the pain, can no longer _feel_ so much.

And so, finally, he cries, cries until he thinks he will die from the bursting inside. Cries until his cheeks are as wet as his hair from the rain, sobbing like a small child, lying on the road in a rainstorm.

And as he cries, something inside him breaks, and he begins to understand.

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End file.
